


The Encompassing Power of the Color Gray

by Soaring_through_the_stars



Category: Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Ballet, Bullying, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Fishing, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Ron Stampler is trans and you will not convince me otherwise, Slight horror, Trans Male Character, Willy Stampler is His Own Warning, but it's Willy so it's a good thing, mentions of abuse, trans!Ron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28077246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soaring_through_the_stars/pseuds/Soaring_through_the_stars
Summary: The color gray encroaches on every aspect of Ron's life, and he hates it. His eyes, his clothes, the house, even his hair, though he's only 17. It's dull and plain, but at least it doesn't drown him.It's a memory, the only memory, the only connection he has to his mom that Willy Stampler hasn't ruined or destroyed.And maybe, just maybe, he can learn to love the color in his new-found freedom.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	1. Gray Walls and Eyes and Hearts

Ron isn’t the best at anything.

He knows that because Willy tells him so.

He talks when he’s not supposed to and is quiet when he needs to respond. He prefers not talking over talking too much.

* * *

He doesn’t remember his mom, but that is for the best. He’s already too feminine, too weak, too fragile already. He doesn’t need an influence that would make him more so.

He remembers that Willy was glad when he was a boy, even if he scorned him for the effort he had to put into it. The few girly things he had disappeared soon after.

He misses ballet.

* * *

The house is scrubbed clean when Willy comes home, but Ron forgot to tuck in his shirt after his rushed shower.

The shirt is unwearable now, and even he couldn’t get the stains out in the laundry.

* * *

The house is silent when Willy is gone, and there isn’t much to do. The house is gray inside and out, the yard is dead with overgrown grass and spindly trees, there’s the bare minimum of furniture. No television, no bookcases, no electronics except for in Willy’s room. Ron only knows that because he can sometimes hear the low buzz of a show or the faint turning of the page when he stays outside the door.

His own room is empty except for a desk and a bed, gray, gray, gray. Like his eyes, but not like Willy’s. Willy’s eyes are the terrible rolling waves of the ocean in a thunderstorm, almost black but for veins of deep, drowning blue.

Ron sometimes sees his own skin as gray, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell if he’s imagining it.

* * *

The only times he can go outside is when the sky is overcast, about to pour, and he is only allowed back in if the sky is clear and he is dry. Sleeping outside had become commonplace, and he relished the tiny bit of freedom. He found a tarp, a calming robin blue, and made a little shelter.

He is allowed back inside the next morning.

He goes back outside a week later. The tarp is a muddy gray, shredded and left on the ground.

He is not allowed back inside that day.

* * *

When Willy is gone he spends his time cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, dusting and mopping and vacuuming the gray shelves and floors and carpets.

Gray, gray, gray.

His hair is turning gray. He’s not sure if that’s supposed to happen at 17 years of age.

It makes him look more like Willy. It’s almost enough to make him care.

* * *

The summer ends, and he goes back to school. Back to garishly bright colors and loud noises and people who make fun of him for everything, including his graying hair.

He tries to focus, but everything is too loud and bright and rough, and he is so, so tired from cleaning the house and standing at the door and carefully washing the spots that hurt.

He doesn’t have his work done. He isn’t good at anything.

* * *

The kids make fun of him, play pranks on him.

Spilling bleach on his clothes, turning them a dirty white, an almost gray. Ron takes them to Willy, and he does nothing. He wears the gray clothes.

Stealing his school books so he can’t learn, he knows the logic behind things but can’t know the details, his history and literature grades suffer, but his math and chemistry only dip. He asks Willy if he can replace them. Ron knows not to be so stupid anymore.

Ron stops asking Willy for help.

Pulling his pants down when he’s walking down the hall. Ron starts wearing more pairs of pants, because at least he can keep his dignity.

Mocking when he gets a question right, stealing his answers for themselves. Ron starts to say ridiculous things and all the thoughts that come to his mind, because at least that way he gets laughs, even if they are directed at him.

It makes his school year a little bit more bearable.

* * *

It’s the winter break of Ron’s senior year of high school when Willy takes him to go fishing. He doesn’t want to go onto the cold, wine-dark sea, he’s never been near any large body of water, he can’t swim to save himself.

Willy drives while he stays in the backseat, spine straight and looking at the cold gray of the winter outdoors.

The boat is unpainted steel, the sky is overcast, the water of a reflection of it. All gray, like their clothes, like Willy’s hair and some of Ron’s.

* * *

They go out far enough that the shore is no longer visible, and the choppy waves are making Ron sick.

Willy fishes and Ron stands there for hours, nothing coming up from the cold gray sea.

Ron should find the lack of color soothing after the cacophony that is high school, but it just makes him tired. He can’t focus on anything, so he just lets his eyes become unfocused, one ear listening in case Willy calls his name.

Not that it would matter.

* * *

When Willy takes out the lure, Ron is startled.

It’s a bright purple, glittering in the pale light that filters through the clouds.

Ron watches as it replaces the dull worm currently on the hook, as it is flung out far into the depths of the ocean.

He walks closer as Willy beckons and doesn’t make a sound as the cigarette smoke is flung into his face. He doesn’t remark as Willy postures on about how this new lure will be a smash hit, bringing in enough money to counteract what is spent on him, even though he has become too familiar with industrial dumpsters.

He doesn’t remark and he doesn’t move, not even as Willy gets a bite. He doesn’t move when Willy is gasping at how strong and big the fish must be.

He doesn’t move as Willy slips on seawater and is pulled overboard fast enough that the cigarette that brushes him doesn’t even burn.

He doesn’t move as the last he sees of Willy is a flash of bright purple that illuminates a twisting, knotted, _endless_ form, large enough to fill the entire ocean. The form of Serenity.

He doesn’t move as the day turns to night turns to day.

He doesn’t move as he is found by the Coast Guard, sunburned and dehydrated and exhausted.

Ron just stares at the water as he is carried away, bright purple lure clutched in his fist.


	2. Silver Mirrors and Purple with Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Ron's heart isn't whole yet, the cracks start to mend.

Ron’s life without Willy doesn’t change all that much.

He’s still in the gray house, but now he access to money.

A _lot_ of money.

It turns out that doing taxes _just_ on the right side of the law, while _also_ being an extremely successful salesman, while _also_ ―for the _second time_ ―somehow finding a cache of sunken treasure during a fishing trip that was kept in a locked compartment of the boat makes a person filthy rich.

Ron has no idea how to process any of this. So, he doesn’t.

* * *

He continues to clean the house, but slower now. He makes dinner for one, and he actually eats his fill. He buys more furniture to fill the house, muted colors but still wildly vibrant compared to the past.

Anything but a dark, dull gray.

Ron can’t do anything about his hair, which reminds him of Willy every time he sees it. He wants to dye it, but he doesn’t know how, doesn’t have anybody to help him, doesn’t want to be made fun of even more. He almost decides to remove the mirrors in the house.

Almost.

In the end, he can’t do it. Even though his eyes are a dead gray, they are the only connection he has to a mom who loved him, who died for him, of whom he doesn’t even have a single picture. He knows this because Willy’s eyes were an abyss that sucked him in and wouldn’t let go, but Ron’s don’t do this. They just sit on his face. They don’t reflect or absorb. They kill the light.

He likes to think, when staring at his eyes in the mirror and ignoring his hair, that his mom’s eyes _shined_ , like a silver-backed mirror, lively and happy, showing a reflection of what life is when it is actually lived.

He hopes that, one day, his eyes will shine, too.

* * *

Ron signs himself back up for ballet.

He’s out of practice, but he kept up his stretches even when they burned his muscles and made his skin shriek.

He might’ve, secretly, kept his _en pointe_ and ballet shoes hidden away.

He might’ve, secretly, danced when he was sure Willy wasn’t going to be home.

* * *

His old teacher is glad to see him back, scolds him for not being there for so long, doesn’t even look at him sideways when he introduces himself again.

Ron has never been more thankful.

He notices that his old awards no longer have his picture, look newer and shinier, proudly proclaiming _Ron Stampler_ for all the world to see.

His teacher winks at him in his peripheral vision.

Nobody cares that he takes a few minutes too long in the bathroom, or that there are still tears in his reddening eyes that turn them into glassy gray pools.

* * *

His first major project on the house is to convert one of the rooms into his own dance studio.

He has never been more surprised than when he finds a room in the house he has never been in, dusty and dim until he opens the heavy, moth-eaten curtains. It is surprisingly large, one wall completely lined by windows. The hallway it comes from has a door right across from Willy’s office, so he’s confused by how he’s never seen it before.

And if the logistics, the sheer space of the room itself doesn’t match with any blueprints, with the layout of the other rooms, Ron doesn’t question it. Just as he doesn’t question the flashes of purple light that keep him company at night.

He has the floor redone into a shiny dark hardwood, and he has mirrors and bars installed on the three walls. The walls behind the mirrors are a royal blue, matching the large, dark gray curtains that span the entire wall of windows, pulled back to frame them.

The room is beautiful, light and airy despite the darker décor.

If Ron spends the first day after it is finished just spinning around it and smiling and _laughing_ the loudest he has ever laughed, well.

There’s nobody around to tell.

* * *

School is starting back up.

Ron doesn’t dread it, not like he used to, but there is something inside roiling around at the thought of surrounding himself with all of that _noise_ again, even if he has new textbooks and clothes and can sign himself out.

Most of that anxiety turns out to be misplaced.

His peers are surprisingly nice to him, giving condolences for the death of his father and complementing his new clothes. He knows that some of it has to do with the money he inherited, _of course it does_ , because that much gold and currency entering the market is bound to make some waves.

But he gets to meet new people, ones who are actually kind but did not notice him before, ones taking different classes.

He likes saying hi to a pair in his senior class when they pass in the halls, extremely popular, undeniably homecoming and prom king and queen each and every year, even as they laugh off the comments that they should date, but always so happy to wave and smile, even if he does not even know their last names, hasn’t even had a single conversation with them.

Samantha and Terry are his closest friends.

* * *

There’s a moment when, after completing college applications and starting on scholarship ones, Ron realizes he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.

He definitely does not want to be a salesman, he knows that much, but there are so many different things he could do. Math, science, English, research, learning, making, crafting, dancing, all of it mashes into a chaotic swirl in his head.

He decides to double major, theoretical and mathematical physics and ballet. Between the scholarships he receives for ballet and the smorgasbord of various lesser academic ones, he’s able to get a full ride to a university he really likes.

But first, high school.

He makes more casual friends at school, academic acquaintances who share the workload of projects equally, and the teachers are giving him more freedom when he’s not dressed in what appeared to be grunge clothes and never having his homework completed.

The start was rough, but his life now is worth it.

* * *

Ron spins and leaps and bends, lights shining in his eyes as he slides across the stage in a facsimile of the bows of the violins in the pit.

He lifts a fellow dancer, marveling how they are now a pair rather than doing the same move together.

His legs burn in their stretch, and he revels in it.

Ron finishes the dance in center stage to thunderous applause. He smiles at the purple light that shines in the back, deeply blue, and laughs.

Purple and blue and gold reflect back from his eyes, brighter than any mirror can compare.

If only it could stay that way.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you enjoy? Please give me comments and kudos, for I am but a simple and lowly slave to instant gratification and the finding of self-worth through the opinions of others.


End file.
